Blokeychap said is this thread about clapping: ”It is sad that I know this but it is also the first time my degree in Greek and Roman Civilisation has come in “
So, in order to welcome him aboard (and hopefully help him feel welcomed) I need to begin this thread: How accurate was the movie Gladiator? Any glaring anachronisms in the film? I am normally hyper-cynical about the quality of anything that crosses the big screen, but my S.O. mentioned she heard it was acclaimed in a review in Archeology Today, a journal not typically noted for their movie reviews. How much of the movie did they make up? What about the costuming, sets, etc.? It was a damn fine movie nonetheless, but I think I’d be pissed if I was Arabic. (The only mideasterner in the film was a stereotypical greasy trader). Wold I have liked it as much if I could tell my Ionics from my elbows? Blokeychap? Anyone?
Thanks,
Good film – what stopped it from becoming a ‘great’ film are some really stupid things. With all the research tools available today, there is no excuse for such stupidity. If you enjoy the film as a ‘Romanized’ western – “I’m looking for the man that shot my paw…’ its pretty entertaining. History … nah.
On a very coarse level:
Horse stirrups were not invented until the END of the Roman Empire
The emperor could NOT have been using a quill and paper – they used styli and a wax tablet (wooden ‘books’ covered with wax on which you can scrape stuff, notations etc… and could be re-used. Paper did not come till later.
Tomatoes were introduced to Italy much much later
The arena was called ‘The Flavian amphitheater – not the coliseum…
The emperor was loved…. True. M.A. was a transplanted philosopher and well loved by the citizens. He was into public building projects in a big way.
He died in his bed not killed by his son
His son, Commodus, was rumored to be the son of a gladiator (his mom visited the arena a lot!) He was VERY well built (muscular) and saw himself as Hercules – in fact all his portraits show a fop with a lion-head –dress – like herc.
Although there was some ‘rebels’ during his reign threatening to topple him– they were not in Rome itself.
Commodus was known to fight beasts (he was a bestearii) – not gladiators
He was not killed on stage
Commodus was first poisoned by his mistress and then strangled by an ex wrestler (I think Ron Moody was supposed to do this in the film but died while the filming was in progress… I don’t KNOW this for sure but only think this – his death scene was shown mostly from the back, so…)
There was no such person as Maximus (well, there may have been but …)
Gladiators – specially trained ones did not fight in the boonies… they were too expensive for that…
Most gladiatorial fights were to ‘the first wound/blood’ not to the death … again they were too expensive to waste.
Roman soldiers did not wear black – especially not the praetorian guards
There was more than one type of gladiator
Gladiators fought in the afternoon – not in the morning
The universal sign of mercy was probably NOT the thumbs up/down – the sign for requesting clemency was the pointed finger…
Gladiators did NOT wear fancy sliding visor helmets – at least not at that time
Female gladiators fought with one breast bare – and only against one another – never with men
There is no way there could have been an announcer in the coliseum announcing fights – can you imagine the lungs on that guy?
There is no way that the crowd could have heard the …”I am Maximus…” speech and gasped… ever tried to recognize your favorite sports guy without the number on the jersey?
There is no way that there were women in the first few rows of the stadium (women and slaves were seated much higher up)
There was no movement that I am aware of to restore the republic after or during the reign of Marcus Aurilious…
I could go on…
Like I said… stupid stupid things. Great costumes, sets etc… too bad they fucked it up at the most basic level. If I can think of these things, can you imagine a history graduate student or a professor could come up in one day…
Actually Commodus’s real life would have been a great film – too bad they couldn’t afford a good writer and a good competent researcher… would have made a GREAT film. One can understand having these mistakes and melodrama in Ben-Hur but not today.
Stupid Stupid Stupid! (Oh I mentioned that already…)
I don’t know about the coloseums, but some of the acoustics in Greek theaters were incredible.
I remember in Ephesus( I think, I was 10 at the time.) I had a conversation with my Dad while he stood on the stage and I sat in the upper rows. We were speaking in normal tones, but we could make out every word.
Commodus was killed in the ring, but as toecutter pointed out, it was he, not his opponent who was poisoned. He reigned a lot longer than the movie implied. His successor was a decent man, but was soon killed by the army. Needless to say the Republic was not restored.
I missed the Tomatoes. That is incredible. This is a simple fact whose correction would take nothing from the movie. Yeesh!
Also: Dog walks into a saloon. One of his feet is bandaged. He looks around menacingly and growls “I’m looking for the man that shot my Paw!”
Good lord, they had tomatoes in the movie??? I’m glad I didn’t see it, I’d have a hard time sitting still through that.
For the edification of those who may not realize: Tomatoes are not native to the Old World, and therefore did not show up anywhere in Europe until at least 1492. Even then, they would not have been regarded as a food, since tomatoes, a relative of nightshade, were long (until the 1800’s) believed to be poisonous.
IIRC they were invented long after the end of the Roman Empire, at about the time of the Norman Conquest.
It was Oliver Reed, not Ron Moody, but he did die during filming and some of his later scenes were done using a stand-in and previously-filmed footage.
I agree with everything toecutter said - I would have said it myself but did not want to hog the thread … honestly I knew it all …seriously…ok…well most of it anyway…bits actually…I don’t like this line of questioning…YOU GOTTA BELIEVE ME PEOPLE!!!
I read somewhere that it WAS a thumbs up/down, but that the movie (and basically, todays society) got it mixed up: thumbs down meant the gladiator lived, thumps up meant he died. What’s the straight dope on that?
And I second the remark about the accoustics in Roman amphitheaters. I too was in Ephesus (currently Turkey), and the guid put us on the top row of an amphitheater with a 40,000 people capacity. He then proceeded to explain the theater to us from the arena ground. It was perfectly audible, even though he was over 50 meters away. I’m sure an announcer would have been audible in the colloseum as well, provided the crowd was mostly silent.
Two more things bothered me about the film (which I otherwise loved):
Maximus rode into battle with the cavalry. This would never had happened - the Romans used horsemen as scouts and skirmishers, not shock troops, and held them in lesser esteem. A real Roman general would have gone in with the infantry.
Throughout the movie, people used the Roman short swords like broadswords, hacking with the edge. This type of sword, called “Gladius”, was used almost exclusively as a stabbing weapon, in conjunction with the shield. Using them the way we saw would have ruined the delicate blade, and length-wise, it just wasn’t practical.
This contradicts everything I have heard about the gladius. Do you have a cite for that?
I don’t remember seeing a single tomato in the movie. I might have missed it, I suppose.
I did notice the stirrups, but I don’t think this is a historical mistake so much as an editing mistake. I think they needed to have stirrups so modern people could ride the horses, and they didn’t hide them as well as they had intended.
I am a little dismayed that so many people seem to think these mistakes are “stupid”. The movie was fiction. They took some real events and added a few characters to make a movie. Was it really “stupid” to create fictitious characters?
toecutter said Marcus Aurelius
Did you do the autopsy?
Yes, I am nitpicking, but I don’t understand these attitudes. After the movie, I did a little research myself, and found it was a lot more historically accurate than I had suspected. Commodus was a real person, his sister really hated him (got herself exiled), he was the opposite of his father in every way, and his father (away at wars for the vast majority of his life as emperor) could not have been a real presence during his childhood. Fertile ground for dramatization, if you ask me. Should historical events never be dramatized? Forget about El Cid and Lawrence of Arabia and all those movies where something historically inaccurate happens in a corner of one shot?
For what it’s worth, and I don’t have time to put up the URL, but I came across something on Maximus just a bit before the movie came out…
He is sort of a hero to the people of Wales. He was a roman general who was declared Ceaear by his troops, and when he marched to the continent to press his claim, was killed before reaching Rome.
He was from Iberia (spain).
Magnus Maximus also lived two centuries after Marcus Aurelius and Commodus.
It’s also not quite accurate to say that “and when he marched to the continent to press his claim, [he] was killed before reaching Rome.” He rebelled in 383; the Western co-emperor Gratian was killed, possibly at his order, at Lyons, shortly thereafter. The Eastern emperor[sup]1[/sup], Theodosius I, came an agreement with him that recognized him as Augustus (senior emperor, not Caesar, a title applied to a junior emperor) and left him in control of Iberia, Gaul, and Britain; the other Western co-emperor, Valentinian II, Gratian’s half-brother got Italy and Africa, and Theodosius retained his realm of the Balkans, Roman Asia, and Egypt. When in 387 Maximus decided that he wanted all of the West, and drove Valentinian II from Italy, Theodosius (did I mention that he was Valentinian’s brother-in-law?) defeated and shortened him at Aquileia in Italy.
Maximus never did get to Rome, but not because he was assasinated in the hour of his triumph. Additionally, by that time, Rome was a faded memory to the emperors; the Western capital was at Milan, and would shortly be moved to Ravenna, whilst the Eastern capital was, of course, at Constantinople. Maximus probably regretted not seeing Rome a lot less than he did losing his head.
[sup]1[/sup][sub]Western co-emperor? Eastern emperor? WTF, you ask? Trust me, late Imperial politics were more complex and less decisive than the situation in Florida.[/sub]
Wow, I had to wait almost 5 months for my answer, and it was here all the time! Unfortunately, the answer is “We really don’t know for sure”. Hey, if Cecil doesn’t know it, then who the hell does?
Re: stirrups. Sherlock Holmes once said to his sidekick, “It’s always obvious to you, Watson, once I explain it”. The All-Wise Cecil pointed out in Why did the peoples of the New World fail to invent the wheel? that all Old World wheels are probably derived from a single inspiration as to its usage – and the wheel, I venture to say, is rather more obvious than the stirrup. As Alessan points out, the Romans considered cavalry an inferior arm. Until Gallienus began to organize central cavalry formations in the 3rd century CE, improvements of horse furniture were probably given a lower priority than the Emperor’s bath. The stirrup was derived from the steppe peoples, and it wasn’t until the “Roman” armies were completely barbarized in the 5th century that the Roman military establishment became amenable to its use. It still took a while to penetrate to exterior nations – a Viking carving of the 9th century shows a Frankish horseman riding without stirrups – probably an error on the part of the carver, to whom stirrups would have been an unfamiliar and mysterious item.
Boris B: read Vegetius’s De re militari, or any other contemporary military writer. The gladius was always a stabbing weapon. You may be confusing it with the longswords of the (probably proto-Celtic) Hallstadt culture.
I’d forgotten all about this thread. Akatsukami
I don’t actually know why I thought the gladius was a hacking weapon. The funny thing is, sometime after this thread I looked it up, and found that it was a thrusting weapon as you good people have informed me.
Looking back, I think I know the source of my confusion. A friend of mine, college dropout who majored in Classics for a year, assured me it was a hacking weapon with blunt tip. Where he got this idea, I’ll never know, but I shouldn’t have believed him. This same individual - with a year of formal Classics and a lot of informal dabbling in Roman history under his belt - said on a different occasion, “Sacking of Rome? What are you talking about about? Rome was never sacked when it had an Empire!” So I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
While tomatoes were regarded by French and British botanists as probably poisonous, the Spaniards and Italians, borrowing from the Aztecs from whom they were procured, began eating them in the sixteenth century. (The story of the man eating a tomato in front of horrified New England spectators who though he was committing suicide reflects more on the backwater nature of 18th and 19th century North America than on knowledge available to most Europeans.)
